Naval Academy astronauts return to inspire recruits

Ken Ham is the chair for the Aero Space Department at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The school has produced more astronauts than any other institution and has lured two back to teach. (Lloyd Fox/Baltimore Sun/MCT)

Lloyd Fox / the Baltimore Sun
Former astronaut Ken Reightler, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., leads a class at the academy on human spaceflight.

The course is "Human Space Flight." The subject for today: analogues - the scenarios found in the world or contrived in the laboratory that NASA uses to simulate work and life aboard a spaceship.

Naval Academy professor Ken Reightler leads the class of 13 midshipmen through a discussion that traverses Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition of the Antarctic, deep-sea exploration and the experiments at Biosphere 2 - and how lessons from each will help astronauts prepare for the first manned mission to Mars.

The discussion symbolizes the academy's efforts to lure more alumni astronauts back to the Annapolis, Md., campus - and to maintain a leadership role in space exploration.

Mr. Reightler, a retired Navy captain now teaching at the academy, served eight years in NASA's Astronaut Corps, flying two missions aboard the Space Shuttle. The midshipmen in the room, which is decorated with posters of astronauts, the Apollo-Soyuz Mission and the shuttle cockpit, include future naval aviators who will be the right age to volunteer for NASA's inaugural manned flight to Mars, should it come as planned in the mid-2030s.

"These folks are right in the right spot," said Mr. Reightler, who graduated from the academy in 1973. "We approach it from that perspective. I assume that one of those folks that I'm talking to today is going to be flying on that mission.

Mr. Reightler, 61, and Navy Capt. Ken Ham, 48, are the third and fourth alumni astronauts to teach at the school. Superintendent Vice Adm. Michael H. Miller told the academy's Board of Visitors recently that he wants to bring back more.

"We're fortunate that more astronauts have come from the Naval Academy than any other school," he said. "I would love to expand our program even further."

While there are no plans for manned U.S. spaceflights anytime soon - President Barack Obama envisions missions to an asteroid in the mid-2020s, and to orbit Mars a decade later - NASA continues to train new astronauts, and the academy expects to continue providing candidates.

Annapolis has produced more than 50 astronauts, including some of the most prominent: Alan Shepard, who flew the first U.S. manned spaceflight and later walked on the moon; Wally Schirra, another of the original Mercury Seven; James Lovell, who commanded the troubled Apollo 13 mission on its safe return to Earth; and Charles Bolden, the Space Shuttle mission commander who now heads NASA.

Academic dean and provost Andrew Phillips credits the success of alumni in the grueling astronaut selection process to what he says is the academy's unique program. A midshipman pursues four years of year-round education, training and professional development to earn a commission as an officer in the Navy or Marine Corps.

"There are lots of great institutions in the country that probably graduate people bright enough to do the work (of an astronaut)," he said. "But they haven't been through a program that has these other features - the leadership, the teamwork, the pressure-packed environment."

Mr. Reightler says the Navy entrusts midshipmen and junior officers with greater responsibility earlier in their careers than do the other services.

"Having an opportunity as a midshipman to go on a sailboat with eight other midshipmen at sea is pretty good preparation," he said. "When you're out there in the middle of the ocean in a storm doing navigation, doing planning, doing all the other kinds of things - damage control, fixing engines that break down, making sure that you take care of people that get sick - I mean, those are perfect analogues of the kind of things that it takes to be successful."

Mr. Reightler, who was born at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland, drew inspiration from the first generation of astronauts when he was at the academy.

He was three weeks into his plebe summer in 1969 when Neil Armstrong made his giant leap.

In the 52 years since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted Vostok I to an altitude of 200 miles and a single orbit of Earth, fewer than 540 humans have flown in space. Mr. Reightler and Capt. Ham both spoke of the experience as life-changing.

"It makes you feel a little bit removed," Mr. Reightler said. "You feel detached. You feel not part of this planet that you've been on all your life and where all your friends are and all history has taken place.

"You see pictures of how big the Earth is and how thin the atmosphere is. But when you really see that, I mean, it really strikes home how fragile the planet is."

Capt. Ham said his "welcome to space moment" came on his first shuttle flight. He was looking down on Europe at night, admiring "the beauty of city lights from space," when a shooting star passed below.

"I'm convinced the more people in the world that go do this, the more our race will change," he said. "It is that altering of an experience, from looking back on the planet to the physical fragility of the planet, how politics might not really matter that much in the big scheme of things.

"It's just a different perspective that I think it would help us all."

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